Sunday, January 04, 2009

Microsoft, over the years has been a pioneer in providing OS. Being a leader it has attracted more than its fair share of criticism. When Vista was launched, it was expected to take computing to next level especially it was following the most successful Os till date, Windows XP. There have been an increasing number of complaints about the performance of Vista. Lets try and analyze how true the statement is by comparing these OS.

Vista is simply a bigger OS than Windows XP. It has a better background services which index your documents, maintain the hard drive, looks for malware, performs backups and the like. Vista grabs more than three times as much memory as XP, even before running any applications. Vista handles graphics more in the manner of video games, using a software library called DirectX designed to exploit hardware-accelerated graphics, DirectX is also used in Windows XP, but Vista uses it throughout, not just for games. These generally use an older graphics library called GDI (Graphics Device Interface).

In Windows XP this was hardware accelerated, but in Vista this no longer holds true. Instead, they are mapped through DirectX. The new system also holds GDI windows in memory twice over; contributing to Vista’s memory bloat. Microsoft did this to enable fancy graphic effects. Microsoft Architect Greg Schechter observes on his blog (tinyurl.com/2y3×3c), “Today and for the near future, most applications use and will continue to use GDI to render their content.

“Go back 10 years to 1997 and let’s compare this machine to the “craputer” of the 1997 day, a Cyrix MediaGX 166MHz with a whole 16MB ram running Windows95. The difference is amazing. I took a look at the vista scores most had and 2-3 were not uncommon! (My machine is a healthy 6.5) and their low scores really did show in everything from the clicking of the mouse to opeing basic office apps which was a 30 second endurance. Think again unless you have LOTS to spend on a fast enough machine. Vista is not so slow it is a future OS. It is a further proof of the old computing industry maxim about processor speed improvements versus software features: what Intel gives, Microsoft takes away.